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Session 5
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Session 5
.As the structure moves away from the soil, the earth pressures reduce from the
at-rest pressure, towards the limiting active pressure - Ka
On the other hand, when the structure moves into the soil, earth pressures
increase towards passive - Kp
But the actual earth pressure may be some intermediate value, depending on the
strain in the soil – depending how much the wall has moved.
In bridges with decks joints and bearings, the abutments are typically subjected
only to pressures between at-rest and active: low pressures.
In integral abutments, when summer comes, the deck expands and the earth
pressures will be significantly greater.
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Session 5
Clearly, for design, we ought to have a good idea what the lateral earth pressures
are going to end up at, given a design life of the order 75 years (according to the
LRFD specification). But there is no standard approach for determining earth
pressures for integral abutments in LRFD, nor are there any in the Eurocodes.
However, there has been quite a bit of research, and this has recently been
brought together to define some recommendations, published by the British
Standards...
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Session 5
That distribution is for full height abutment walls, where the thermal movements
are accommodated by rotation or flexure.
For short walls – as in bank pads or end screen abutments, thermal movements
are accommodated by pure translation. For those, we can use a much simpler
“triangular” pressure distribution.
But for both cases, we have this “special” earth pressure coefficient for integral
bridges, generally given the symbol K*
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Session 5
And that’s fine for a range of integral abutment types such as these:
Full height integral abutments on pad footings or pairs of piles, and bank pads
Internationally the problem has been having a way to calculate a value for K*
which agrees with the research. That’s where the UK recommendations in
PD6694-1 finally have expressions which have been validated against a wide
range of the available data.
... Simple though they seem these expressions are a big step forward.
For bank pad abutments– where the movement is translational - it’s a similar,
actually slightly simpler expression.
So we can calculate the earth pressures, using K*, and apply them to ...
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Session 5
And PD6694-1 also gives guidance on the appropriate pressures for wingwalls,
bearing in mind this ... soil ratchetting effect.
I’ve illustrated a short span slab deck bridge modelled with shell elements here,
but it’s worth considering, for a moment, the structural idealisation of the bridge
itself. Because …
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Session 5
For example, these common integral bridge types – including embedded walls
and those, including bank pads, on a single row of piles.
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Session 5
But we have still the abutments or bank pads on piles, where lateral movement at
the pile head does not infer plane lateral movement of the soil in the same way
that movement of a retaining wall does. There may be some arching of soil
between piles – some judgement may be needed. This makes continuum models
less attractive and the use of springs to represent the soil more attractive.
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Session 5
Since, for these construction types, granular backfill is usually installed behind
the abutments, strain ratcheting must be taken into account, and the formulae for
K* in PD6694-1 incorporates this
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